Original subtitles

I'm Tim Tate. I've been an investigative journalist

for almost half a century.

And what I specialise in is exploring official archives,

unearthing dusty old files from government departments,

spy agencies, the police.

This strange figure looked very much like an astronaut.

And what I have found in those collections,

both in Britain and in the United States,

is a truly extraordinary collection

of real life X-Files.

True Cryptids, like the Yeti and the Mongolian death worm,

death worm...

And those files disclose investigations by the police,

by governments, by spy agencies.

Shortly after that transmission, Captain Schaffner's radio went dark.

To examine and uncover the truth about phenomena

which are truly out of this world.

It's a great piece of branding the death ray.

Everyone knows where they stand with the death ray...

What if everything we have learned from science is wrong?

If our governments had proof of this,

do you think they would let us know,

even if our survival as a species depended on it?

In these days of changing climate and rising sea levels,

floods are one of our greatest fears.

But what if the water keeps rising? Are we prepared?

And what would we choose to save?

In the spring of 2025,

a rash of excitable newspaper headlines

splashed an astonishing story

that declassified previously secret

US Government X-Files

revealed that the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency,

had searched for,

identified and located Noah's Ark.

The story of Noah's Ark is told

in the Old Testament book of Genesis.

In it, God sends a catastrophic flood to destroy all life on Earth.

The only person God warns is Noah, who builds an ark to save his family

and two of every creature on Earth.

In the biblical account, the Ark

lands upon the mountains of Ararat.

This is probably a reference

to the ancient kingdom of Urartu,

which flourished from around the 9th century BCE

till about the 6th century BCE.

So these are mountain tops in the north of Mesopotamia.

So if you're living in Mesopotamia or in the ancient Near East,

these mountains would have been the tallest mountains

that would have been known about.

The story of Noah's Ark

has become one of the most popular Bible stories

and is often told to children,

but it also speaks to our darkest fears.

The Ark story has a great attraction

because it is in many ways the...

I suppose it's the original survival story.

It's the story of how against all odds

a catastrophic event happens and one family survives.

Those stories still attract us today.

They tend to reflect deep anxieties about events beyond human control,

whether that is an asteroid hitting the Earth,

whether that is the catastrophic effects of climate change,

whether that's a volcano.

It tells us really about ancient fears,

the possibility that the whole of civilisation

can be lost through a catastrophic flood.

And this is a story that belongs very much in Ancient Mesopotamia,

in the area of the world that we now call Iraq,

because that is a part of the world that is very vulnerable to flooding.

Whilst the story of Noah's Ark might serve a cultural

or even psychological function,

is this ancient tale taken seriously by modern scientists?

There are advantages in using folklore

to inform on a more... traditional archaeological approach.

For example, in Britain,

there are lots of stories about ancient sites

like Stonehenge that ascribe them to the work

of giants or the wizard Merlin.

Mythic stories about how these places came to be.

And in some of those locations, there may be a grain of truth.

There may be some elements that are preserved as part of that narrative,

which might be interesting to explore in itself.

We can still see Stonehenge

because it has survived down the ages.

But could evidence of a boat made of wood 4,000 years ago

still really exist?

The idea that the Ark might still survive is a very old idea.

It's already mentioned by the early Jewish historian Josephus

in the first century AD.

It's not something he's seen.

He's telling how others have reported that they have seen wood

or that the... the Ark can still be seen

and still preserved on a mountain in Armenia.

According to interpretations of the Bible,

the Ark was deposited on a mountainside after the flood.

And according to certain biblical scholars,

there's a particular location in contemporary Turkey

called Mount Ararat, which is supposedly the location of the ark.

The area has always been the site of political

and sometimes military conflict,

which makes it difficult for archaeologists to work there.

However, the political upheaval

meant that it was also of interest to the CIA,

and in the '60s and '70s,

they were keeping a close eye on the area with U-2 planes and satellites.

There was an interest in the period

in around the 1960s and '70s,

about whether satellite imagery or airborne imagery

could be used to locate the site...

the site where the Ark is meant to have landed.

A series of requests within

the CIA administrative system

asked whether they knew -

the CIA as an organisation knew whether this was Noah's Ark.

And lots of these communiques were entitled "re Noah's Ark,"

which presupposes the CIA

had identified this site positively as Noah's Ark.

As far as we know, they've never done that,

but by naming something, you make it so.

Certain individuals were very interested in the fact

that the CIA probably had photographic imagery of Mount Ararat

and that this might provide evidence for the preservation of Noah's Ark.

But even as recently as the 1960s,

not everyone believed the science.

Some saw scientific claims as going against the teachings of the Bible

and the Word of God.

One of those was Henry Morris,

who is sometimes known as the father of creationism.

Henry Morris wrote what could be regarded

as the... founding document

for modern creationism, a book called the Genesis Flood,

which he wrote in the 1960s with somebody called John Whitcomb.

and that argues that the geological evidence

for the age of the earth

can actually be understood not as signs

that the earth has existed for millions and billions of years,

but are actually sign of a catastrophic worldwide flood.

And so finding evidence for the Ark

would be also to find evidence

that the world had been created

in six days by God,

and evidence that, in fact,

evolution as we know it was fundamentally mistaken.

CIA denials that they had any photographs

that proved the location of Noah's Ark were met

with claims of a cover-up.

This is a normal pattern in the birth of a conspiracy theory,

but in this case,

there was more than a grain of truth in these claims.

Those photographs had indeed been taken by the U-2 spy plane

and by satellites, and the CIA held them,

but absolutely refused to release them.

It said, "We can't release these.

We can't disclose these for national security reasons."

Once the photographs were released,

they would surely solve the mystery.

Did they show evidence that Noah's Ark had indeed landed

on top of Mount Ararat?

These photographs show what more traditional archaeologists

would suggest to be geological features

and what more creationist archaeologists suggest

are the remains of Noah's Ark.

The local names for this location

broadly translate as Noah's Mountain.

So there's a kind of folkloric source there,

but there's also these aerial photographs

that have the form of a kind of ship in plan.

So two curvy, linear positive lines,

which are ridges on the top of this mountain.

But these days, it's not just the CIA photographs

that can be used as evidence.

Archaeologists have now started digging at the site on Mount Ararat.

Since 2021, researchers from two Turkish universities,

in conjunction with one American university,

have been examining a boat-shaped mound near Mount Ararat.

And carbon dating samples

from that mound indicates

that it dates to the time

when Noah is,

according to the Bible, supposed to have built,

sailed, and eventually beached his ark on Mount Ararat.

The big point of contention is how you interpret

those positive features.

Whether... as some people have suggested,

these are the remains of Noah's Ark,

or whether as more traditional

archaeological scholars have interpreted,

these are actually geological features.

How the features are interpreted

can sometimes depend less on what is found at the site

and more on what the searchers bring with them.

Some of the problems with that archaeological work are also that

they are undertaken by people

who have a very literal interpretation of the Bible.

And there's a fabulous quote by another archaeologist who says

that no expedition that has ever gone looking for Noah's Ark

has failed to find it.

Have those scientists found the location

of the remains of Noah's Ark?

If so, that's a genuine historical revelation and indeed sensation,

though those tests and researches are still ongoing.

What none of that proves

is that the CIA got there first,

that it located Noah's Ark,

and that it covered up the existence of its knowledge.

The idea of spirits coming back from the dead to haunt us

is frightening enough.

But a ghostly apparition without a head

would surely be enough to scare even the sturdiest of souls.

The one thing we have never been short of in Britain

are ghosts.

Every village seems to have a haunted graveyard

and a manor house would seem incomplete

without the chain-rattling spirit of an ancestor.

Very few of these stories have ever found their way

into the august pages of the Times,

the journal of record for the British establishment.

And only one can claim to have been investigated

by a prominent former Home Office official

and Justice of the Peace.

And that story is the Headless Woman of St James's Park.

The story of the Headless Woman of St James's Park

actually begins, as far as we can tell,

in early 1804, when soldiers on guard duty

began to speak of this headless woman who was appearing to them

between the hours of one o'clock and two o'clock in the morning.

And in fact, several soldiers were so startled by it,

they ended up in hospital for several days.

We do have a record from one of the soldiers who saw the Headless Woman.

A man by the name of George Jones, who said that he was on guard duty

between one o'clock and two o'clock in the morning,

when suddenly from the ground in front of him

there appeared the form of a woman.

Jones was confronted by a terrifying vision.

The spectral image of a woman

rose up in front of him, no more than four feet away from him.

And the thing that struck him most about her, he said,

was that she didn't have a head. She was without a head.

He could see the collar around her neck,

and that was blood-stained.

But the woman had no head.

And then very quickly...

...she vanished.

And it absolutely terrified him.

And he went right racing off to try and report it,

found another soldier, told him what he'd seen,

and as far as we can tell, that's the first major sighting

of the Headless Woman of St James's Park.

Just a few days later, the Headless Woman appeared again.

This time, she had appeared to another young soldier

who was occupying the same sentry box that Jones had been standing in.

And this young soldier was found in a dead faint.

Within a week, the spectral image of a headless woman

appeared to a third soldier.

At that point, the stories did become public,

and they made their way into the pages of the Times newspaper,

and it caused a sensation.

This enthralled... and horrified...

the Times readership.

That publicity led to an official inquiry by Sir Richard Ford,

a former MP,

a former Home Office official,

and who was then the Chief Magistrate for the area.

He held hearings

and in those hearings Jones adamantly stuck to his story.

He insisted, he said he would swear it under oath

that he had seen this woman rise up in front of him

and that she had..a bloodied collar

and just the stump... of a neck.

We have to keep in mind that this story

is very early 1800s of a headless woman in St James's Park.

This is the early days of spiritualism.

There was certainly a lot of writing of that time

in many books and newspapers about spiritual experiences,

people seeing ghosts, haunted locations.

So already, the 1800s was priming itself

to become really interested in ghosts and spirits

and life after death.

And so newspaper accounts were starting to fuel that fire.

Sir Richard Ford, the man heading the inquiry,

was hardly a conspiracy theorist or a ghost hunter.

He was, in fact, a fairly mundane establishment civil servant,

and he was baffled.

He tried to think of any possible rational explanation.

And as he cast his mind back,

he recalled an incident 20 years earlier.

It was a murder case.

A case involving a sergeant in the Coldstream Guards

who had killed his wife,

decapitated her

and dumped her body in the canal

running through St James's Park.

That seemed the most likely explanation.

That this new appearance

of the headless woman in St James's Park

was a manifestation of the ghost of that unfortunate army wife.

But the Times had other ideas.

Its reporter claimed to have solved the mystery

and to have come up with a very different explanation.

According to the report in its august pages,

the Times said it had discovered the so-called ghost

was in fact no more than a prank.

It said it had discovered

that two Westminster scholars, as it called them,

had been experimenting with Phantasmagoria.

Now Phantasmagoria was then very popular.

It was an early form of magic lantern shows in which images

were projected onto a screen to widespread amazement.

The Times didn't identify these two mysterious Westminster scholars,

nor did it quite explain how...

they could have projected the image of the headless woman

onto the night air.

Because there was no back sheet in the area.

No projection reception device

which could... have been used.

But nonetheless, this was now the explanation.

It had all been a prank.

The explanations of Sir Richard Ford and the Times

don't seem to have completely exorcised the phantom.

Across the years, users of the park

still record supernatural encounters with a headless woman.

The sightings of the Headless Woman in St James's Park

continued over many years, but they were very intermittent.

But another significant one was in 1972,

when a driver says that they saw

and nearly hit the apparition of the Headless Woman.

A taxi driver was driving through the park, and was terrified...

...when the apparition of the Headless Woman

appeared suddenly in front of him.

Some reports saying they crashed into a lamppost.

So distinct for him was the apparition in trying to avoid it.

When the police came, he said that he'd actually been driving along

and suddenly a lady in a red dress had appeared before him

and he'd swerved to avoid her.

Try as you might, you will not trace

any official records to support this account.

Which, despite the lack of foundation, is repeated now

time and time and time again,

in cheap books or internet threads,

as proof of a ghostly haunting.

The Headless Woman's reputation may have been sullied,

but perhaps her power to frighten persists.

Would you be willing to take a stroll around the lake

in St James's Park at midnight?

There's a bridge that crosses the lake

in St James's Park now.

It's a beautiful spot. You can stand there.

If you look to one side, you can see Buckingham Palace.

Look to the other side, you see the government buildings of Whitehall.

But go there at night when it's pitch black

and you've just got the moon overhead.

Stand on that bridge, and if you're on your own,

it is absolutely terrifying.

Nobody knows why we seem to be so fascinated

by stories of the paranormal.

But one thing is certain - they captivate us

just like a moth drawn to a flame.

The word monster comes from the Latin monstrum,

meaning a divine portent or a warning.

Those who are brave enough to study monsters

will tell you that they come in two main types.

One are true Cryptids.

Flesh and blood animals like the Yeti, the Mongolian death worm,

animals thought to have died out years ago,

but are still around like the Tasmanian wolf.

But then there's this other group

that are much stranger.

And these seem to be genuinely paranormal.

So these aren't flesh and blood animals as we think of them,

and the way that you and I are flesh and blood animals.

These are some kind of very ancient,

very terrifying, paranormal phenomenon.

Late on the night of November the 15th, 1966,

two young couples were parked up in a car

on the site of a decommissioned munitions dump

when they encountered a terrifying sight.

They saw two lights in the darkness

and they realised that these lights were huge, glowing orb-like eyes

and the owner of the light shuffled forward.

And they saw this mysterious creature,

which was winged,

almost like a dark angel.

Covered with a brownish-greyish hair.

It had a 10-foot wingspan.

They were terrified and drove off.

This terrifying creature then pursued them

as they sped away back to town,

and the creature emitted eerie screeching noises

as it flew behind them.

And it pursued them at 100 miles an hour.

And they felt sort of... almost attacked the car.

They certainly felt they heard some noise on the roof of the car.

And it only veered away when they approached the town.

The town was Point Pleasant, West Virginia,

in the Appalachian region of the southeastern United States.

Well, the police looked into this,

and they looked into a number of sightings...

...including... a guy whose dog Bandit

tackled some creature with large glowing eyes and then vanished.

And then the dog's carcass was seen at the side of the road

by another witness.

It appears in a local paper.

A larger paper, usually a national paper,

is looking for interesting stories.

They find this one. They publish it and it starts to spread.

The frightened citizens of Point Pleasant, West Virginia,

tried to explain away the horror of the Mothman sightings

with rational explanations.

Some of them tried to explain it away as a very large heron,

which doesn't fit the picture.

A local wildlife biologist said that it was a sandhill crane.

Again, doesn't fit the picture. These are tall, spindly, thin birds.

Whatever Mothman was, it was a bulky...

It had a bulky, heavy body with these great glowing eyes.

The sceptic, Joe Nickell,

came up with a very lame explanation that this was an owl.

There are no owls anywhere in the world that are seven feet tall

and can chase cars at 100 miles an hour.

With no viable explanation,

the Mothman story might well have ended there.

Had it not been for a terrifying accident

at the Silver Bridge near Point Pleasant,

13 months after the Mothman's first appearance.

On December the 15th, 1967,

the Silver Bridge collapsed.

47 people were killed in the disaster.

Two bodies were never found. They were presumed to have been

washed away by the Ohio River's strong flow.

Locals saw the appearance of the Mothman

as a portent of the disaster, and the story really began to take hold.

You get two paranormal specialists who wrote books about it,

and one of them is called the Mothman Prophecies.

And, of course, that was when it got its name, and the name stuck.

It's a lovely, you know, it's a lovely, easy to remember name,

and it conjures up something rather strange.

The sightings didn't stop

after the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

But they were not always quite what they might have seemed.

There were hoaxes.

Apparently some construction workers

put the red car reflectors...

onto balloons and sent them up in the air.

Some of the hoaxes were more imaginative reworking.

The one I'm particularly thinking of is this little film

which is supposedly found footage

of people going off into the woods and looking for the Mothman.

I mean, this kind of found footage film

achieved a great deal of popularity.

And I think it wasn't so much trying to deceive and frighten

as playing along with... with this phenomenon.

- There she is! - Richard!

Then in 2002, Hollywood got in on the act.

A Los Angeles studio bought the rights

to the Mothman Prophecies book

and set about scripting a supernatural horror movie.

It would star Richard Gere and Laura Linney,

top-drawer name actors.

Unfortunately, the producers created an entirely fictional lead character

played by Richard Gere, who was a reporter on the Washington Post,

who had an encounter, a near-death encounter with "the Mothman"

and then went on to investigate

and narrowly escaped death in the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

Only through his intrepid journalism in this movie

were the two events finally able... to be associated.

Because he... he doesn't...

The invention of a fictional character

in a Hollywood movie inevitably muddied the water

between fact and fable yet further.

All the more so when it was revealed that the Silver Bridge collapse

was caused by the failure of the suspension mechanism

rather than anything supernatural or paranormal.

Mothman is, I think...

almost unique in the way that the town has adopted it.

So, what is a horror figure

has become, I think,

mascot would not be the wrong word.

The town has really now used Mothman as its identity.

There is now a little Mothman Museum.

There is a Mothman Festival in September every year,

and they would dress as the Mothman.

There's a statue, a very elaborate statue that was commissioned,

that's in the middle of the town.

So, the town has kind of created the sense that we are the Mothman town.

Which is very interesting because it's made it a very positive image.

So it's managed to reverse this into something which is,

"Let's be scared, but not too scared."

But not everyone buys into the idea

that the Mothman has been domesticated.

And while they may not think it to be a real creature,

they believe there is an even more frightening explanation.

I don't think that Mothman was a cryptid.

A cryptid is an animal that's unknown to science,

or maybe one that's thought to be extinct but might still be around,

such as the Tasmanian wolf.

Mothman, I think, was a paranormal manifestation.

And why I say that is because of the intense fear it engendered.

This raises the question,

where does the Mothman's power come from?

How was it able to conjure up such primordial fear in us?

I think one kind of has to go back and think,

"Where did it come from?"

And you get a lot of supernatural monsters,

particularly associated with forests.

I mean, this rural area is quite a forested area,

and they seem to be this kind of semi-demonic sort of character.

You might very well, at some point, have gone into the woods

and seen witches and devils and various things.

Well, this has kind of defanged that kind of religious overtone

by simply making them sort of horror monsters.

And in this case, you know, it's gone from being whatever it was,

the monster that you met in the woods

at the time when you really believed that the devil haunted the woods,

to a horror monster, to our monster.

You know, he may be a monster, but he is ours,

and we, you know, we like him.

With the Mothman change, you might imagine

that we have seen the last of him, but that is not the case.

There has been a recent sighting.

I think it was 2016,

and it was a picture was transmitted on a local TV station.

So people are seeing these animals.

They're seeing kind of ambiguous information,

taking pictures, and it's a theme.

The idea that there is these crypto-zoological things out there

that we don't know everything.

That there are mysteries, is tremendously appealing.

And in the case of the Mothman, too,

you also have the possibility that it's precognitive,

that it either prefigures or causes some kind of big disaster.

So I can see how it would just be perfect legend material.

I think the legend of the Mothman persists for a number of reasons.

One, it's been linked, I think, erroneously,

with the tragedy of the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

That's just a piece of modern day folklore.

But it's the creepiness of it.

It's the idea of the small town monster.

This thing that's lurking on the edge of civilisation

and seems to occasionally... come into our habitat,

chasing cars, looming out of the darkness

and then vanishing again like some sort of phantom.

The camera doesn't lie.

So when a photograph seems to show something extraordinary,

we tend to look for an extraordinary explanation,

but that isn't always where we will find the truth.

When an aeroplane crashes,

there is usually loss of life

and an immediate search for the cause of disaster.

Mechanical failure, human error,

striking another object, running out of fuel,

all manner of things can be to blame.

But in modern warfare,

a reliable machine is a matter of life and death,

and finding the cause for aircraft failures

can be the difference between winning and losing.

In April 1942, as the Allies suffered

a devastating series of setbacks

against German forces,

the Royal Air Force published an article

in its official journal,

entitled The Gremlin Question.

Every pilot, every navigator seems,

"to be on nodding terms" with gremlins.

Swarms of mischievous creatures

who caused havoc with the aircraft.

They caused havoc with bombs, with navigation,

with every part of the aircraft equipment.

The one thing lacking in the RAF document

is a description of what a gremlin looks like or where they're from.

It's important to remember that

until the early years of the 20th century,

no one had any idea what existed

above the Earth's atmosphere.

There was no concept of what might be in this stratosphere

and that provided fertile ground for novelists and storytellers

to come up with their own ideas

and to weave them into speculative fiction.

There's a very famous story

that was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1913

called the Horror of the Heights

that was published in Strand Magazine.

And it's all about a flyer around the sort of pre-war period

who... goes up way beyond

where pilots of that era could go.

And he finds that the upper parts of the air around sort of 24,000 feet,

way beyond where any aircraft could go at that time,

was populated by creatures.

Weird creatures, the sort of creatures that you

would perhaps find at the bottom of the sea who lived in the sky.

And his aircraft is attacked by these creatures

who are sort of fighting amongst themselves.

And this is a human being who's gone up in a piece of metal.

So they descend on his aircraft and pull it to pieces

and he crashes to Earth.

And all that's left of him is the wreckage and a note

that basically says, "Beware the horror of the heights."

Now the frantic race of inventing, improvising, adapting

and refining aircraft equipment began.

Throughout the first World War

that fictional story gained currency

and it gained currency within the pilots and officers

of the Royal Flying Corps.

Now they were trying to manipulate cumbersome biplanes,

primitive planes, and also fight battles.

The first sightings would have been when

aviation started, and there were lots

of unexplained things

happening in aircraft

that people had no clear explanation for.

If you became a pilot,

particularly a military pilot at that time,

your chances of survival were slim.

Particularly if you were a fighter pilot over the Western Front.

I mean, they... they... they...

they were lucky to survive two or three days

when they were deployed to a fighter squadron.

So a lot of what happened when they were going into the sky

was all about luck.

A tradition arose that if something went wrong on your aircraft,

fuel gauge, propellers...

something that hadn't been properly serviced,

and you didn't want to blame it on humans,

you blamed it on goblins.

And the RAF version of this was "the gremlin".

By the time the Second World War came around,

the belief in gremlins,

stratospheric gremlins who interfered with aircraft...

...gained currency.

It gained so much currency that anywhere on any base,

"gremlin" became a byword,

a shorthand for anything which went wrong with a plane

which didn't have an immediate and obvious cause.

But it wasn't just pilots who told tales of gremlins.

The United States Air Force

published an illustrated guide to gremlins,

that it distributed all across its bases in Europe.

The guide contains illustrations of cartoon characters.

Who are given names like Bubbles, Nitrogen,

and a list of the effects the gas can have.

But it doesn't take itself too seriously.

The guide is humorous. It's... It's tongue in cheek.

But it is actually serving a serious purpose,

because those conditions that it described are very real problems

which affect aviators flying at high altitude.

There was a US Air Force B-17

stratosphere operated flight test station

which experienced a number of very unexplained events,

such as oil leaks and lack of oxygen

when they were flying at over 40,000 feet

and that's where they explained them by saying it was the gremlins.

The hallucinatory effects and the physiological effects on pilots

flying at high altitude in the early days of aviation

without the same equipment that they have now,

I think could have been quite a contributory factor

to people beginning to see things that maybe weren't there.

Uh-oh. Here it comes. The message.

As we go rolling...

Hi, Mac.

♪ Rolling home ♪

Name is Grogan. Technical gremlin, first class.

And then the British Government got on board.

It began issuing posters which were tacked up

on air bases all across the country

warning pilots about gremlins.

These posters are extraordinary.

They carry a very real safety message.

"Don't do this. Always wear your goggles.

Don't do that."

And attributed the reason for that to the dangers of gremlins.

Then in 1943, a young RAF officer

on secondment in Washington, DC

took the gremlin story even higher into the stratosphere.

Roald Dahl, who became one of the most celebrated novelists

of that period through to the '60s and 1970s,

wrote a short story Children's Story, the Gremlins.

And he described Gremlins as mischievous creatures.

He said they were six inches tall

and they plagued air crews all over the world.

It was a lovely children's story

and it explained that Gremlins

were so antagonised by air crew

that they decided to create havoc,

to cause mischief on planes.

I was very lucky because I...I...

My first little book I wrote was called the Gremlins,

which was bought by Walt Disney.

Walt Disney seized on this and he published a syndicated column

illustrated with pictures of Gremlins

to strengthen the message about Gremlins

and the risks they posed to fliers.

He said, "If you doubt that they exist,

that's because you haven't flown a Spitfire in a dogfight

or been in a bomber over Germany."

The combination of Roald Dahl and Walt Disney

quickly got the attention of the British Government,

who saw it as a neat way to issue warnings to pilots

about the dangers of flying at high altitude

with Gremlins as the convenient scapegoats.

They got on board with Disney's projected film.

He said, "I'm going to turn Roald Dahl's novel into a feature movie."

And the British government said, "That sounds like a good idea."

In the end, that movie never happened because, true to form,

the British Government, stiff and censorious,

wanted control over every last aspect of the production

and indeed the finances.

Wait! That's different.

Are you kidding?

Why, the minute they start talking to you,

you'll go all soft and...

But the end of the film wasn't the end for the Gremlins,

as their empire spread from aviation into other spheres.

I think Gremlins were adopted as a fiction for many other situations,

such as driving, marine, etc.

Where anything went wrong

that really could not be easily explained.

There's not so much reporting of them now.

I think probably because the word Gremlin has been

taken over in other situations such as the movies

that have got that same title.

The Gremlins had gone from being an in-joke among pilots

to conquering Hollywood and become a term we use in everyday speech.

But only when something goes wrong.

It was those official USAF

and RAF inputs,

which gave the Gremlin's story legs, an entirely fictional story,

but one which became a pervasive myth...

...for flyers during World War II.

Look, friend, I don't know what all this sarcasm is about,

but I'm getting out of this man's air force.

Capital O, capital U, capital T. OUT.

Next time on Britain's X-Files...

How did an experienced pilot

disappear from the cockpit of his plane?

Does Russian film show a woman moving objects

with the power of her mind?

Did the Nazis discover the Holy Grail?

And what was the thing

that terrorised a peaceful Wiltshire village?

Subtitles by Sky Access Services